Are Lady Gaga followers Apple or Android fans? Amazon is using the flamboyant celebrity to push its cloud storage option, selling the singer’s new “Born This Way” album for only 99 cents. Along the way, the Internet retailer hopes you’ll pick it over Apple’s $16 iTunes price … and in doing so, be locked into using their Cloud Locker service instead of Apple’s forthcoming iCloud.
Apple’s plans to bring music streaming to the upcoming iCloud service are coming together swiftly this week as the company signs up a third major record label.
With all the deals getting inked and all the right hires in place, Apple is increasingly ready to jump iTunes into the cloud… possibly as early as next month’s WWDC. But how exactly will it work?
We’ve been speculating on Apple’s partnership with Nuance for some weeks now, and confirmation the two companies are working together comes with the new speech technology discovered in the Mac OS X Lion beta.
Cult of Mac has learned Apple could be scheduling secret employee meetings with retail staff on May 28th between 8 and 10am. Is this just pre-WWDC preparations, or something more?
When Google and Amazon launched their cloud music services, they did so without signing deals with the four major music labels. Apple will not be following suit, and according to music industry insiders, having all the contracts signed is what’s going to let Cupertino kick the competition’s teeth in.
Apple’s giant datacenter in North Carolina may bring advanced voice controls to the iPhone and iPad, reports Techcrunch.
The function of Apple’s massive datacenter — one of the biggest in the world — has been kept firmly under wraps. The North Carolina facility is like Area 51: everyone knows it exists, but few know its true purpose. Observers believe it is primarily for iTunes in the cloud, but Techcrunch suggests it is already set up to bring voice recognition to iOS 5.
According to Techcrunch reporter MG Siegler, Apple is already running advanced voice-recognition software from Nuance Communications – the company behind the Dragon Dictation applications for the iPhone and iPad — at the massive datacenter. The two companies will announce a deal at WWDC in early June.
And that likely means that iOS 5 will feature a plethora of advanced voice controls when it also is unveiled at the programmers’ conference.
Apple has invested a considerable amount of time and money on iOS, the mobile version of Mac OS X, that powers the iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, and Apple TV. So it just makes sense that Apple would re-invest iOS technology into the Mac version of OS X. Steve Jobs has pretty much said so himself and we’ll start to see this happen with the release of Mac OS X 10.7 bearing the code name Lion.
First of all it is no secret that Apple plans on bringing a number of features to the Mac from iOS. These features include the following:
Mac OS X will allow applications to remember open windows, etc. similar to resuming apps when launched on iOS. Automatically saving application documents will also be an integrated feature similar to what happens on iOS when you suspend or quit an app.
As WWDC and the unveiling of iOS 5 approaches, we’re all wondering what Apple may or may not bring to its devices with the next major iOS release. One thing that could be introduced is speech recognition, courtesy of Nuance Communications – the company behind the Dragon Dictation applications for the iPhone and iPad.
According to a TechCrunch report that cites “multiple sources,” Apple has been negotiating a deal with Nuance which could see them integrate the company’s speech recognition technology into the iOS platform. While negotiations could have potentially been about an Apple takeover of Nuance, TechCrunch believes that at this point that’s unlikely.
Just seven days after Steve Jobs promised to fix the location tracking bugs in iOS, an update is available now for download through iTunes.
A free download, iOS 4.3.3 fixes three bugs related to location tracking:
The data isn’t encrypted, but Apple says that will be fixed in the next major update, likely iOS 5, which is expected at WWDC in early June.
The 4.3.3 update applies to the iPhone (4 and 3GS, but not the iPhone 3G); iPad (1 and 2); and iPod touch (3rd and 4th gen, but not 1st or 2nd gen).
There’s a separate 4.2.8 update for the Verizon iPhone 4 (the CDMA phone is still on a different fork of iOS).
Update or no, Apple is still expected to testify at a May 10 Congressional hearing about mobile tracking.
